Author: Teel

I always do this. Mess things up. Always is probably not the right word, but it feels like it. I have trouble remembering the last time I met someone new that I liked and didn’t screw things up. Do I mean to do this? Am I intentionally creating problems for myself? I don’t think it’s conscious. I hope it isn’t.

Fuck. fuck, fuck, fuck…

So much nothing. that’s what I’ve been posting lately, so much nothing. Little things, non-involved things. look, a dog walked by. Look, I’d like to read some books. Look, I’m begging for your money, because I can’t earn any on my own. Nothing about how I feel. How losing my job and being so incompetent that I can’t get a replacement job and I have to go live off my father’s hard work and move 100 miles away from everything I’ve known for the last 20 years makes me feel. How having every person who finds out I live up here asks me whether I’ve made any friends or what I do for fun, when unless my grandfather has to go get chemotherapy I don’t leave this 1-acre plot of land for more than a couple of hours a week, and how that would be fine if people would just stop fucking asking me about it. Out of sight, out of mind, and I grew up online, so I’m more than happy to connect with ‘the world’ every night on the computer, but when you remind me that there are people out there I could be spending time with in person, when you remind me that my life consists of the same stories my grandparents tell over and over again and the same well-worn paths through the mud on the same lot my grandparents have been living on for over 40 years, it occurs to me that there might be more to life than this.

Until I started falling recently, I was more content with being the lone hermit who didn’t long specifically for a relationship than probably any other time since February 1998, the last time I was ‘really’ in a ‘relationship’ with someone. That I’ve been so single for so long was something I had been able to come to grips with and just settled in to become a normal part of me. I have a Blue Skies comic about 80% done about that very thing, actually. Now there’s this person I’m falling for, but it’s like I’ve never talked to a girl before in anything but a platonic way, I haven’t a clue as to how to behave to pursue a ‘relationship’ with her. Or what that relationship should entail itself. Or how to stop thinking about it.

Fuck.

Something real. Something like these two new scars I have on the back of my left hand from having to heat my room with fire. Something like standing ankle deep in mud trying to get the forklift unstuck. Three times in two days. Something that I know how to describe, that I have words for, that I can speak about to people and they know what I mean. It doesn’t have to be ‘all or nothing’, but it does have to be ‘something or nothing’. And if it’s going to be something, I’m going to want to know … at least vaguely… what that something is. I know what ‘all’ is.

If I start a conversation by explaining what I’m about to be doing and why, and then I proceed to do that thing, does the other party have any right to not understand what I am doing? Fuck. I do it all in fast forward now. Which doesn’t make any sense, since the lifestyle up here means everything moves at a snail’s pace. Did I just do in 6 days what used to take me 6 months? Was that exactly what I said I wanted to do? Find out in days instead of months that it won’t work out, that I’m heading toward heartache. I suppose that solves the problem of a slow descent, but what happened to all the good, ignorance-is-bliss times in between? Aren’t the good times supposed to make up for the bad?

Fuck. Fucking fuck fuck fuckity-fuck. fuck.

I think I began figuring it out as I was doing it. Began seeing it for the first time. That I was playing games. Games! That I was testing her. Pushing her away and at the same time telling her I wanted her closer. Being too intense too fast, then being too critical of myself for it when she said it wasn’t too much too fast.

There are actual problems though, too. There was a conversation we had where she (without saying a name) was describing this guy she knows. She said she had become friends with him and they had a lot in common, and I wasn’t sure, but the tone of her voice sounded like she was setting me up for something, made me think she might be talking about me. And she said she’d been … intimate with him… but that she didn’t want to date him and did that make me upset? And I won’t go into detail, but it still sounded like she was telling me that she liked being friends with me and found me physically and sexually exciting/arousing, but that she didn’t want more than that with me, and I was speechless. I just didn’t know what to say. And she started telling me more, and revealed the guy’s name, and then because she wasn’t saying she didn’t want to be with me it didn’t matter that she was saying she was currently involved with … well, essentially a ‘fuck-buddy’. And because of the brevity of our relationship so far and its total lack of concrete (or flexible) boundaries, I found myself of not being in any position to have a position on the matter. I found myself feeling feelings that I had no right feeling. But I couldn’t say anything for some reason. Something inside me just assured me that no matter how fast or far I think I’ve been falling, I have no right to get upset over her existing relationships. That even if I did, she wouldn’t have to stop them, she’d just stop telling me about them. There’s a part of me that just wants to get right to that relationship that does have boundaries, so I can know whether I should be feeling this feeling, and there’s a part of me that just wants to forget about her forever, and another that just wants to be with her, no matter the circumstances, and another that would be pretty happy being something like this ‘fuck-buddy’ of hers.

Uhg. And there’s the part of me that wishes I could turn off my heart and go back to living and being alone and not thinking all the time about a person I can’t see and how I could see them. Or about being with any of the other people I’ve fallen for and can’t see. I’m so cold, I’m so tired, I’m so … lost.

I’m sure I’ve been rambling. I’m not sure this made any sense. I doubt she’ll read this. Fuck. That’s another thing that … could potentially have become a bigger problem between us; our views of the nature of privacy and the public nature of the web. She has a website that she linked me to and it has diary entries (like a blog) and I went and read them. When I mentioned this to her, she considered it a huge breach of her privacy, like if she had been in the shower and I’d broken into her diary in secret. And she told me that she didn’t like the idea of reading old entries in my journal/blog, either, or anything else I’d written about myself or my past or my emotions in the past, and didn’t understand why I thought it might be useful to her. I mean, I put myself out there for everyone, hoping that by sharing myself in a totally public way like this eventually people who like me and my life and can handle the way I emote will come out of the people who read the site. OR … well, I’m not sure I believe in such a thing as privacy. Anything I do or say could become known without my knowledge or will to keep it secret. Any word I write down could get to anyone at any time. Internet or not, I cannot keep a secret. Information wants to be free. So, since I don’t believe there’s much to this ‘privacy’ myth, I don’t bother being anything but open and honest when I have my wits about me. I post things like this on the internet for all to see and it’s almost not a suprise anymore when the strangest people know the most intimate details of my life and emotions. I seem even to have come to expect that people who care about me, my friends and family, are interested in reading about my life. Except that unless she’s holding me to a double standard (she has a more up-to-date online journal and has explicitly told me to NOT look at it), she doesn’t even want to read my site, perhaps even thinks I shouldn’t want her to. I don’t understand how she can say I don’t want to get to know her enough (because I don’t know what to ask her to get her to start talking) and at the same time tell me not to read her publicly available journal about herself and her life.

I’m getting too cold to type again, and I’m out of wood. I’m going to bed. Fuck. I didn’t mean for it to go this way. I don’t want to lose people before I even finish falling for them. I don’t want to be this way. This is not me.

This is not me.

So, as you may or may not already be aware, at some point in the past I created an image for a parody of a parody of a parody of a parody that involved a squirrel on fire. The so-called ‘flaming squirrel’ has since become one of the most popular images I have ever created (second only to ‘moo‘). In fact, the Flaming Squirrel Merchandise in Modern Evil’s Cafepress stores has been the most money-making design we’ve ever offered. Except … well…

As a smaller number of you may know, the squirrel originated from ‘The Bench’, a public-domain sort of build-your-own-comic from the creators of Penny Arcade. So, errr… me making money from its use is something they could theoretically ask me to stop doing at any time. Except, I think they’re cool with it. In fact, I believe that if I emailed them and … well … linkwhored (ie: linked them to the merchandise & asked them to link to it on their very popular website) … they probably would, and the people would show up in droves, and Modern Evil could make some money and maybe not disappear.

Of course, if I do bring it to their attention, they may just ask me to take it down, and any potential future profits from it would be lost instead of increased. What do you think I should do?

So, as I did Sunday and Monday, I had the little dog follow me down to the Post Office while I checked our boxes, sort of to see if he had a clue about where he was supposed to be, bu also for another reason. The second reason must have been the right one, because it worked today. I was walking down to the Post Office, the little dog following happily along behind me, at the right time. That is, everyone in town gets their mail via PO Box, and most of them show up at the same time of day, between about 11:30 and 12:30. As luck would have it, I was approaching the Post Office and a guy at the other end of the parking lot yells out to me “That’s my dog!”

So I walk over to meet him and he wants to know where I found him and explains that the dog gets out a lot, then picks him up and walks off saying something about good timing. I take the flyer I’d put up in the Post Office down, check the mail and return home. No problem. No more dog.

So I was minding the store today, minding my own business as it were, and it was a fairly uneventful day. A few customers, but since it was raining non-stop all day, there wasn’t much foot traffic in downtown Pine. So I took the opportunity to work on part of a painting that someone commissioned recently, and was making some good progress. Around 3 or maybe 3:30, Perry came over to let me know that he was closing up for the weekend, and whether I knew whose dog a little dog following him was. Nope. Never seen it. No customers or customers’ cars in sight. No idea. He says it just walked up the road, came right towards his store and inside. It followed him right over to my store and inside, too. Browsed for the rest of the afternoon, but didn’t buy anything. I think he was like most of the people who stopped by today, just trying to get out of the rain.

No one came by (or drove by looking like they were) looking for a dog, and when I closed up shop I got the little guy to follow me over to the grandparents’ cabin to see what they thought we should do with him, whether send him back out onto the highway or tie him up or what. He tried barking at the cats, but we wouldn’t allow that, and he ate all the cat food, and he sure was someone’s pet, since he has a collar (no tag, pretty beat-up collar, actually) and thinks it’s okay to sit on chairs. We decided we couldn’t leave him down with my grandparents because of the cats, so he’s up here with me now. My room (my life) is simply not equipped to deal with pets, but after a bit of whining I figured out he needed to pee and took care of that, then that he was thirsty and brought him some water. Now he’s sleeping peaceful-like in the handy-dandy I-never-sit-in-this-chair-so-you’re-welcome-to chair (with a uhaul blanket over it). I sure hope he doesn’t think he wants to get up early in the morning. I certainly don’t.

Anyway, I took a couple of shots of him to send down to Phoenix tomorrow so my dad can make up a ‘found dog’ sign for us to post at the Post Office, though it is highly suspected that this 3 or 4 month old pit bull (am I even spelling that right? Does it have a silent ‘q’ or an extra ‘i’?) was simply let out of the car by tourists who didn’t want him anymore. About the right age to have been someone’s brand new puppy on christmas morning, I suspect. I also hear that this breed likes to eat children. So, maybe I’ll keep him around.

I’ve never liked dogs before, but if I can teach this one to climb trees, maybe he’ll trim them for me.

So, for unspecified reasons, the first book reviewed by the Modern Evil Virtual Book Club (MEVBC) will be Fight Club by Chuck Palahniuk. At least three members of MEVBC have already read it, but we’re going to give the rest of you … one week to read it before we have our VBC meeting. The Virtual meeting will take place in MSN Messenger, though we will consider other means in the future. Also, because I don’t know everyone’s availability, I’m going to say that we’ll meet online sometime next weekend: Either Friday, Saturday, or Sunday. Probably in the evening. Potential MEVBC members, let me know what day/time you think is best. If you don’t, you may miss out.

Oh, and the second book, for those of you who want to get a head start, will be Isaac Asimov’s The Foundation Trilogy. Probably we’ll meet about that one in a couple or three weeks. From there, it’ll be books from the SF book list mentioned before, selected by the MEVBC members. Moo.